Grofers lays off 10% of employees, withdraws 67 campus job offers

Grofers said it will be laying off few people in every department but the support and content department will be worst impactedVikas SN&Madhav Chanchani | ETtech | Updated: June 30, 2016, 01:04 IST

SoftBank-backed grocery delivery service Grofers is laying off 10% of its workforce and revoking 67 campus job offers, Grofers co-founder and CEO Albinder Dhindsa has confirmed to ET.

In a email to its employees, Grofers said it will be laying off few people in every department but the support & content department will be the worst impacted. The laid off employees will be receiving a months' pay as severance. Grofers currently has about 2,000 employees.

"The target will be to reduce workforce by about 10% within the next few days, some departments like support and content which were scaled for a different level will have a personnel share go down than others but each of the department heads will be talking to you along with Saurabh and Albinder to answer any questions" the company's human resources head Rishi Arora said in an email to its employees. ET has reviewed a copy of the email.

"The primary decision of this decision is our changing growth trajectory. We grew at an insance pace last year but given that as of April this year, we have reduced marketing spend next to nothing, we dont forsee the same growth rates to continue" Arora said in the email. "This is also driven by a general slowdown in activity in the market, which we don’t see improving in the next few months".

This move comes six months after Grofers shut down operations in nine cities, citing low adoption of its services. Among the cities where the services were shut include Mysuru, Coimbatore, Kochi, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Nashik, Rajkot, Ludhiana, and Visakhapatnam. Employees in these cities were relocated to other cities.

Among the worst hit were the food and grocery delivery startups. Sequoia Capital-backed rival PepperTap shut down its grocery delivery service to pivot to logistics business in April this year. Flipkart and Ola also shut down its respective grocery delivery "experiments".

Campus placement woes

Earlier in the day, several campus recruits hired by Grofers also took to social media to express their anger on offers being revoked few days before the joining date.

In an official blogpost, Dhindsa and other co-founder Saurabh Kumar said they have been making "necessary strategic changes within the company" that has made the new roles redundant, due to which they are no longer able to honor these offers made few months back.

Last month, Flipkart had also deferred the joining dates of new recruits from June to December, angering several premier management and engineering institutions. India's largest e-tailer said it was a tough decision to delay the joining dates but was a necessary move.

Other startups who have either delayed the joining dates or entirely withdrawn its offer in recent months include CarDekho, Hopscotch, Roadrunnr (now Runnr) and Click Labs.